When environmental engineer John Feighery got an internship at NASA in the 1990s, he wanted to be an astronaut. Instead, he was given a job working with a team designing the U.S. bathroom for the International Space Station.
The small, closet-like space needed a toilet, a place for hand washing, a place for bathing and a place to keep toiletries. Feighery also worked on a project to fix equipment designed for monitoring crew health, which included testing water and air quality.
After the Columbia Space Shuttle accident in 2003 left seven crew members dead, the Space Shuttle programme was suspended and further work on the International Space Station was delayed.
Feighery turned his focus from managing water, sanitation and health problems in space to those on Earth.
“I’d been working on supplying clean water to three or four people in space, and meanwhile there are a billion here on earth that don’t have it,” Feighery told AlertNet. “The world that my kids are going to grow up in has this huge problem that I felt like I could work on.”
